Moms

After 2010's Mines, Brent Knopf left the band and Danny Seim and Justin Harris continued as a duo. Their first record as a twosome, Moms is without doubt the most aggressive record Menomena have ever made.

Editor's Note: The lead of this review has been changed, as the original text contained a passage similar to one found in the Willamette Week interview linked in the piece. The author of this review, who read the interview in question, indicates that the similarity was not intentional. Pitchfork regrets the error.

What's worse: the encroaching feeling that something's going terribly wrong, or the fallout from the inevitable? On 2010's Mines, not much was going right for Menomena's Danny Seim, Brent Knopf, and Justin Harris. The band was hardly talking, their inability to communicate in a civilized fashion meaning that the record took over three years to complete. Something had to give, and Knopf left the band. Seim and Harris figured out their communication issues, laying bare to one another their proposed subject matter for Menomena's first record as a duo: Seim's realization that he had spent more time alive without his mother than with her-- she died in 1994-- and the fact that Justin's mother had essentially raised him alone, his father a frequently flighty and difficult Vietnam veteran. It's not exactly the kind of thing that calls for balloons and party streamers, yet Moms largely eschews the weighty devastation of Mines for an unusually dramatic tone; the most notable example of which are Justin's saxophone parts, now more like fanfares than harbingers of doom. It's feasible that the record's bold sound might have been conceived to compensate for Knopf's absence-- and not in a bad way-- though it's hard to see how the vagaries of the songwriting that Knopf demonstrated on his most recent album as Ramona Falls would fit into Moms' emotionally raw feel. These aren't so-called naked songs in the singer-songwriterly sense; Moms often feels like turning up to a family function in the buff, and letting everyone have it.

If Mines was about possession-- note the cute baby grab of the title-- then Moms concerns itself with what we're given by others; ancestry, in a word. But the push and shove here is how these familial endowments inspire gratitude and resentment. "Hail Mary, is this golden ticket all that you've left me? For the therapists to pawn off and retire on the proceeds?" goes "Baton", one of Seim's songs that deals less with regret than the anxiety over memories slipping away-- like "I wish I could remember if my last words were sincere." (The ominous and distant "Tantalus", the name of a street near where Seim grew up in Hawaii, seems to be about revisiting childhood as a tourist.) It freewheels through different intensities-- a light organ and skewy drum solo in the verses, gradually intensifying to a chorus that's blustering and huge, but made up of the erratic samples that characterized their earlier work, which is definitely a tendency now more particular to Seim than Harris.

True to the interview that originally revealed the band's fractious relationship, Harris is considerably more direct lyrically. (As an aside, it's quite eerie how much both men sound like Damon Albarn vocally.) "Baton" is followed by "Heavy Is as Heavy Does", which opens with a bitter conversation between the piano's high, pleading notes and unwavering lower end, Justin cutting straight to the chase: "Heavy are the branches hanging from my fucked up family tree." Come the end, bouts of saxophone inflate and burst, combining with squealing guitar for an effect akin to driving around hairpinned back roads in the dead of night, the rain pounding like bullets.

Moms is without doubt the most aggressive record Menomena have ever made. "Giftshoppe" gamely bowls along with the sweet, rhythmic chant peculiar to so many Menomena songs before wreaking a course of total disorientation; piercing piano reeling around huge drum fills (it's one of Seim's) and blurry synthesizer hazes that slosh rapidly between the speakers. Masculinity comes in for a kicking too-- "You perverted, aging fuck/ What age did your mind get stuck?" Seim sings nonchalantly, possibly to a mirror. "Pique" has less jagged, more luscious production (though bears quite the guitar solo towards the end), but sees Harris once again compete for the record's most affecting lyrics: castigating his dad for his haphazard upbringing, making him "a failure, cursed with male genitalia/ A parasitic fuck with no clue as to what men do, and impossible to love." The note with which he holds that last line feels like the climax of some (admittedly unusual) rock opera with a very non-rock opera subject; testosterone, you got a lot to answer to.

It's not tough to guess which "tiny muscle" Seim is pleading to work at the beginning of "Capsule", where he's "like a nervous random stranger at a glory hole." The song kicks off with a growling guitar lurch, veering into a verse characterized by the kind of bassline that's as cool as a stoner that keeps their wit about them even at points of maximum intoxication. Perhaps it's endemic of his being a "perverted, aging fuck" that talk of glory holes gives rise to recollections of his mother, though his realization that "we never talked on a cellular telephone" is a mark of his age and era. Things get darker on Harris' "Don't Mess With Latexas", a conflicted ode to the seduction of someone half one's age (and IQ) which heralds its subject with elastic guitar splurts that sound like the products of windmilling arms, choral "huh huh huh"s adding to the theatricality. The only rumination on the subject not wrought by self-flagellation is the jaunty "Plumage", which opens Moms in a similar way to how "Queen Black Acid" opened Mines-- as someone slips away, though this time Harris is pleading rather than admitting defeat: "I don't want to be just anybody to you/ I want to be your one and only mate for life/ Instead I'm just like everybody else who's tried."

The thing with songs about relationships is that the lyrical denouement needn't be the end. The arcs of these stories are varied, but cyclical; plenty more fish in the sea, and all that. The familial, ancestral, genetic subject matter of Moms, however, only has one resolution, the certainty of which Seim entertains towards the end of "One Horse", a 10-minute epic where stark cello snips stand on ceremony as the rest of the song crumbles like a cliff face: "I know the ending/ Yet I'm faking suspense/ We're fertilizer for the trees/ From dust to dust, roots will pass through us." Although Moms is the result of its two creators' putting themselves through the wringer, it never feels overshadowed by dread. Whether the downward spiral or the fallout, Menomena are pros at putting on a game face.